Hungry Enough to Ask for More

Summary

Summary prepared by Acts 2:38 Life from the sermon's captions — published in summary form; watch the full sermon at the source.

Preached Wednesday night, April 3, 2024, in the same week-long revival at the church carried by the Apostolic Messages channel (pastor, Elder Brother Epley) — Easter Sunday's preacher returning midweek, the Monday service having been dismissed for storm weather. He read one verse, Matthew 5:6 — "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled" — and lingered on the promise's grammar: not could be, might be, maybe, but shall. The only condition on being filled is hunger. His subject: "Hungry Enough to Ask for More."

Hunger, he argues, is the engine of every success — the thing that gets the businessman up before the snooze button and drives the athlete past the point where others stop — and an uninspired life of mediocrity is the sure result of a life with no hunger in it. By way of the physical, he lays out ARFID, the avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder given its name in 2013: people, mostly children, with little or no interest in food, who avoid eating until their bodies fail for want of vitamins, minerals, and protein — some to feeding tubes, some, in extreme cases, to starving to death. People have died of disinterest in the very thing that could keep them alive. Then the turn: there is a spiritual ARFID sweeping Pentecost. A century on, the movement is better off in almost every carnal way — more money, buildings, talent, resources — but the spiritual man withers while appetite stays strong for everything else. Inside every person is a God-sized void; money, relationships, parties, drink, and drugs each fill it only until morning. Satisfaction is not found in this world at all, because our joy is not tied to this world: when life is over, the only question that will matter is whether we were ready when he called our name.

What follows is diagnosis and remedy. A vision he was given years ago: angels in a service with everything every person needed — miracles, deliverance, financial blessing, help in marriages — and nobody took anything, because God will not shove down a throat what a person is not hungry enough to ask for. Hunger shows: a truly hungry person cannot sit still and hide it, and the man who says he wants his marriage fixed, or the seeker who says he must have the Holy Ghost, but will not lift a voice or be first to the altar, is not yet hungry enough — "I can't want it more than you." The illustration is Oliver Twist with his empty bowl before a stingy master; our Master is the opposite of stingy, ready to fill the cup until it runs over, but somebody has to be hungry enough to open his mouth and say, "Sir, can I have a little bit more?" He warns, too, about what the hunger feeds on all week: a soul full of carnality will loathe even the honeycomb of God's word, and men in Scripture missed miracles for having no room. Abraham and Moses, friends of God who had walked and talked with him, still wanted more — and the church must refuse to believe its greatest days are behind it, honouring the elders who paid the price precisely by not coasting on what they built; his text for that confidence is the latter-house glory and the last-days outpouring.

The close turns the disorder's cruellest side effect into the sermon's point: malnutrition causes infertility. The church is a mother; a mother too malnourished to be filled cannot bear children, and the reason some houses see no one receive the Holy Ghost is not the baby but the mother. Travail belongs to the hungry — comfortable people don't travail — and the Bible's desperate hunger to bear children ("give me children, or else I die") is the posture he calls for: willing to fast, pray, consecrate, and say to God, here's my cup, here's my life — fill it all the way up. Seek first the kingdom, and the rest is added.